The death toll is at 5,700 now in Yogyakarta in Java. Now the beureaucratic wrangling is starting even before the dust settles. Some politicians don’t want to declare a national emergency and keep it local. It might have something to do with relief funding.

Kind of like the the wankers in charge of the Hurricane Katrina relief in New Orleans.

I read in the Jakarta post that documents pertaining to the prosecution of the ones in charge of the rampage in Timor in 1999 have all been stolen. There are a lot of shifty things going on at the moment in East Timor and the bad guys are using the turmoil to cover their tracks.

I think that quite a few hoods are using the political tension as cover to loot and and take care of grudges before things settle down again. The east end and the west end within East Timor have some Hatfield and Macoy type of thing going on that doesn’t help matters either.

And of course where would we be without the bird flu. A couple of cases showed up in Indonesia afew days ago that might have been human to human transmission.